


rupture

by starcall (frostbloom)



Category: League of Legends RPF
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Canon Compliant, Cloud9 Ensemble - Freeform, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-23 23:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14943527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostbloom/pseuds/starcall
Summary: “I’m Rookie of the Split, dude, but. What the fuck does that matter?"Licorice lets himself break and doesn't know how to fix it.





	rupture

**Author's Note:**

> rupture (n.)  
> 1\. the act of breaking or bursting  
> 2\. the state of being broken or burst  
> 3\. a breach of harmonious, friendly, or peaceful relations
> 
> (Cho'Gath's Q, Rupture: ruptures the ground at target location, popping enemy units into the air, dealing damage and slowing them.)

Eric “Licorice” Ritchie just might be the next big thing.

After bouncing around a few Challenger teams he takes rank 1 in North American solo queue. People hype his NACS performance on EUnited to the moon and back. There are hiccups along the way, like getting smashed in both finals and promotion tournaments of NACS, but also high points, like a 10/0/15 Maokai game or being named the pioneer of Cho’Gath in the top lane by every esports media outlet there is, drawing attention and excitement from many in the pro scene.

When EUnited fails to make LCS, Cloud9, Eric’s former Challenger home, signs him as a starter. Soon enough the fans deem him Rookie of the Split and gush about him popping off on Gnar, Camille, and every carry in between. There are hiccups along the way, like drawing fans’ initial ire for not being named Impact, but also high points, like high quality Kled gameplay or smashing Impact’s Gangplank as Vladimir, satisfying the tiny vindictive part of himself when Impact lays his head on the table and cries. (Top Die.)

Licorice _is_ the next big thing. That’s what everyone says.

Cloud9 falls apart throughout the second half of the regular season, then loses to Team Liquid 3-0 in quarterfinals; the smug look on Impact’s face tells it all. Licorice packs up his equipment with a sinking heart and follows the rest of his team out. He carefully avoids looking out at the crowd.

There are hiccups along the way, Eric knows that. Where are the high points now? Are there any high points?

* * *

Reapered raises his voice, and he’s clearly frustrated. Jack does not raise his voice, but he’s just as frustrated. Eric lowers his head and stares at the carpet. Maybe he should get used to this. It looks like it’s only going to happen more and more often.

At dinner that night Dennis tells him to get off the Internet for a few days. “Eric—no, Eric,” his jungler says, between bites of rice. Eric stops browsing Reddit and shoves his phone below the table as quickly as he can, but his jungler has already seen and is now shaking his head, looking surprisingly stern. “It’s not worth looking at. Of course they’re going to think they know everything. Just don’t look at it.”

“Easier said than done,” mutters Eric before he can stop himself.

Dennis looks at him steadily and replies with an odd laugh, “Oh, I know. I know.”

 

It takes Eric all of one day to realize that he should have listened to Svenskeren, because of course his teammate would know best. That doesn’t stop him from being an idiot and continuing his self-destructive browsing of social media.

While idly scrolling he stumbles upon an Impact interview about C9 and only briefly hesitates before clicking on the link. No, he shouldn’t be looking at Reddit. Yes, this was a bad decision. Since he’s stupid he reads it anyways. It only takes a few seconds for Eric to realize that his name is plastered all over the interview. And really, he should have expected that. He should have also expected to read something like this:

_“I didn’t really pay attention to Licorice. I honestly think Licorice is bad.”_

It stings just as much as he expects it to, and maybe a little more. Eric makes a valiant attempt to swallow his pride, reads the rest of the interview with growing numbness, and tells himself to learn from what Impact says about him, but for the next week the only lines he can recall from that interview are those two.

* * *

“Hey man,” someone yells up the stairs, just as Eric is about to slip his headphones back over his ears. “You won! You’re Rookie of the Split!”

“I won?” he mutters as the footsteps retreat back down the stairs. He opens his Twitter as quickly as he can and finds the lolesports tweet at the top of his timeline—a slightly unattractive picture of him packing away his mouse after losing in quarterfinals.

He retweets it, feeling light and happy for the first time in days, and that’s that. Later on the rest of the team hollers congratulations at him in the living room; when Reapered slaps him on the back with a hearty laugh, Eric wonders when smiling suddenly became so easy.

* * *

Joy doesn’t last long. It never does. He knows the odd feeling of emptiness too well and that’s what keeps his expression relatively normal when someone shows up in his next stream and starts running their mouth in chat, talking shit about how bad he is, how he should be replaced, etc. It’s nothing big really, it shouldn’t matter—their username is literally “teamliquidfan2”—but each tiny jab stings a little more and Licorice should really just stop reading but he doesn’t. Despite his other viewers immediately working together to shut the guy up, it doesn’t really matter because Eric has already read every single word and feels the familiar emptiness yawning open within him. His smile falters a little on his face and he refocuses on his game. _Not worth it,_ he thinks to himself, a desperate reminder. _Not worth it._ But the beast of emptiness inside him continues to grow, and quietly, gradually, he feels himself begin to feed it. Negative thoughts, depressive emotions, lying awake at night rethinking every single play he had made in each and every game—

It’s when he doesn’t know what to do anymore that he calls Deftly. This is his biggest mistake. “Matt,” he mumbles into the phone. “Hey dude. I—”

“I didn’t get to talk to you when it happened,” Matt exclaims, his voice going momentarily tinny over the receiver, “but congrats, man! Rookie of the Split! You’re actually smurfing.”

“Yeah thanks dude, you did really well too,” he replies, forcefully injecting as much cheer into his tone as possible. It’s not that he doesn’t mean it. He’s being sincere. Deftly had been a good rookie too, and if he’d been with a better team, one that had enabled him and given him resources to play with like Cloud9 had given Licorice, then maybe…

“Hey, bro. You alright?”

It takes a moment for Eric to realize that he has the most unnatural smile possible plastered on his face, and no one is even there to see it. He drops it immediately. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Everything is going great.”

Deftly is silent for a moment.

“Are you…?” he asks slowly, confusion evident in his voice. “I mean, um. Yeah, so I definitely think we should meet up soon. Maybe we can figure that out?”

Eric starts to agree but it catches in his throat on the way out and instead—

“Fuck,” he gasps out, helpless laughter bubbling up between words, and his friend trails off in uncertainty on the other end of the line. “I’m Rookie of the Split, dude, but. What the fuck does that matter? What am I doing, what the fuck am I worth?”

It comes out in a frantic gush of syllables and he expects to feel better after he’s said it but he feels even less than he did before, if possible. There’s no reply for a while and _oh god,_ now he’s just an asshole. He’s out here complaining after winning Rookie of the Split to one of his competitors. Not just his closest competitor for the honor, but his own best friend, currently on a team that had performed much worse in the Spring Split than Cloud9 did. Too late to take anything back now, so instead Eric just leans back against his headboard, closes his eyes, and thinks determinedly about nothing at all.

When Matt finally speaks, he’s unnervingly calm. He doesn’t sound angry or sad. He doesn’t even sound surprised. “Eric, are you sure you’re alright?”

“Isn’t that such a joke—” Eric starts. Then he stops because his voice is beginning to wobble. He hates himself. “I’m sorry,” he says instead, and hangs up. Then he hurls his phone at his pillow and buries his face in next to it.

Matt doesn’t call back. Eric wonders if that’s for the better.

* * *

_Deftly leaves EUnited and goes to Golden Guardians. Licorice leaves EUnited and goes to Cloud9._

Deftly leaves for Korea. Licorice stays in the Cloud9 team house, watching his teammates go on vacation, to bootcamp, or home. He streams occasionally to pass the time but mostly just hangs out with whoever’s still in the house, going out on far too many food runs. Sometimes he takes long walks on his own in a nearby park, a small one that he used to visit often during his time on EUnited. Time seems to drag by a bit, passing slower than normal, but after he plays enough games of solo queue it doesn’t really matter anyways.

A few weeks later he flies home. Being home should make him feel better, right? He can take a break from the game, see his friends and family again, pet his father’s new puppy. This should be exactly what he needs to get his head in the right place again.

Instead he finds himself spamming ARAM games and smurfing in Diamond 5 with the C9 house manager Marissa in between obligatory hang-outs with friends. One night he impulsively streams even though he doesn’t have the right equipment. Maybe some of the few Cloud9 fans that still think the sun shines out of his ass can cheer him up a bit. It only sort of works, just a little, but he’s so ready to cling to whatever shred of happiness he can that he goes out and gets the equipment he needs, then streams again the night after.

“I’ve been feeling down lately,” he blurts four games into a solo queue win-streak, and immediately regrets it. Fuck. Too much. That’s too much. What reason does he even have to feel down? Isn’t that just asking for further ire? Half of Cloud9’s fans already want him replaced. He can’t just say stuff like that to people that don’t care.

So he tells Twitch chat, “I don’t know,” when they ask him why, fiddling with the cord of his headphones and avoiding looking directly at the camera. “Just… the offseason, I guess.” He leaves it at that.

It takes some effort to keep his face blank and his voice even. Too much effort.

He doesn’t save the VOD of that stream despite the win-streak; he doesn’t play for the next couple of days. The less he thinks about how off he’s been feeling, the less he shows anyone when he’s like this, the better he’ll get—although he spends so long with nothing else to think about that he can’t tell if this approach is effective or not.

 

But it doesn’t happen that way. Eric leaves his home behind and goes back to the team house; the days slog by as though he is dragging himself through the heaviest mud. No excitement. No life. Nothing.

He hasn’t contacted Matt since that awful phone call. Would his friend want to talk to him anyways? Eric isn’t sure but he doesn’t really want to take any chances. Matt mentions him in a couple of tweets with their old general manager from EUnited, some pointed stuff about meeting up when they’re all back in LA, et cetera, but Eric is so despondent at this point that he doesn’t even bother replying, just drops a like on each tweet and then his phone off the side of the bed.

He wakes against his own will in the mornings. Sometimes he sits up and throws a pillow at the wall, then wants to go back to sleep and has to get up to grab the pillow. Most of the time he just stares at the ceiling until he falls back asleep. He doesn’t even leave the house anymore, not unless it’s necessary. Whenever meals are served he shows up to eat, laughs as boisterously as possible at just about everything, and then trudges back upstairs to lose himself in a few games of solo queue.

He’s convincing. He’s gotten good at this. It’s not the greatest way to live but he can’t really afford to be picky.

When he streams again he can feel himself smiling a little more and he tries to hold onto that joy as best he can, but it’s fleeting, and the weight of the world crashes back down when he tries to go to sleep that night. Eventually it just becomes tiring to stream and he stops trying.

Someone notices how out of it he looks. Eric knows that someone notices, because he can always feel someone watching him worriedly whenever he comes downstairs for meals. Maybe it’s Marissa. Actually, it’s probably Zach. Zach always sees everything. He doesn’t ever press the issue though, not when it’s something serious.

But whoever that is that sees, they never say anything about it. No one ever says anything about it. It’s actually Jensen that gets the closest when he makes a pointed joke along the lines of “I think Eric is moping, someone go jack him off,” and Eric manages to play it off with a quick laugh.

* * *

On the Saturday before scrims begin again, Eric throws on a dark hoodie and walks out of the house. The night air is cold and crisp; there is no moon tonight. He doesn’t tell anyone where he is going. He is completely alone—well, almost alone. There’s some liquor with him, strong stuff he’d swiped from the kitchen on his way out and poured into a water bottle. He doesn’t want to get arrested or anything. Considering what a mess he is right now, that’s probably still going to happen, but he’s too far gone to stop himself. And where is he going? God, he doesn’t know. He really doesn’t know anything these days, does he?

Even without a set destination in mind Eric finds himself in the same park he usually walks to. No one is around, as usual. He sits down heavily on a bench and gets halfway through the bottle in his hand before he starts ruminating on the current state of his life.

“What’s wrong with me?” he mumbles aloud. For the last couple of months he’s felt nothing but _broken,_ stuck in an bottomless descent, an unending downward spiral _._ He hates that. He’s living his dream, isn’t he? Not only is he a starter on one of the top teams in NA LCS, but he’s Rookie of the Split.

So why does everything feel hopelessly listless? Lifeless?

Well, he doesn’t want to think about that, so he just keeps drinking. At some point the world becomes a blurry mess. Initially he thinks it’s just because he’s completely drunk but he puts his hand to his face and it comes away wet. Huh. He’s crying. Why the hell is he crying? He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t have the right. Why the fuck is he crying?

Sometime later Marissa texts him asking where he is; he reads it but doesn’t respond. She calls ten minutes later and he doesn’t dare answer; instead, he just sits and lets his ringtone blare out cheerfully into the silence of the night.

Zeyzal is the next to call. Eric can imagine the look of exasperation on his face already. He picks up to try and explain himself and the first thing he hears is, “We’re worried about you.”

“Not asking where I am?”

A pause, and then Zeyzal sighs. “Well, no. I don’t think you would tell me.”

Of course not. Zeyzal knows him too well. “You… you’re right,” Eric slurs through drunken laughter, and hangs up.

He knows the rest of the team is worried when Blaber of all people calls him. Blaber never calls. He just drops random texts every couple of weeks. This time Blaber calls him thrice in the span of two minutes. Eric puts his phone on mute and laughs a little more through his tears. It’s not even funny but he can’t think straight so he just ends up laughing until his stomach hurts.

At some point he basically passes out on the bench. It must be many minutes later when he wakes with a start—someone is standing over him, shining their phone light directly at his face. “Fuck,” he says, with feeling. His head is pounding. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah, no, I should be asking you that,” replies a very familiar voice. “Eric, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

“Oh, hey Matt,” says Eric dumbly, and chuckles a bit like the idiot he is. His words still take a while to leave his brain and reach his mouth. Of course Deftly would find him in this state. “Isn’t the weather great?”

“Zeyzal called and asked if I knew where you were, claimed you were getting wasted somewhere. I kind of figured you would be here? So I walked over to check,” Matt continues. His face glows weirdly with the light from his phone. Eric kind of wants to touch his cheek but he doesn’t get to because Matt catches his hand halfway and squints at him in bewilderment. “Holy shit, you’re actually so drunk.”

“I’m fine,” mumbles Eric. Even as the words leave his lips, those embarrassing tears return to blur his vision once more. How good does he think he is at telling lies, just spouting them off like this without a second thought? He isn’t fine, not at all. He’s never felt farther from fine in his life.

It’s only when Matt makes a faint, choked noise in the back of his throat that Eric realizes he said that out loud.

“It’s okay not to be fine,” his friend replies, voice suddenly soft, and he feels the tears start to spill over. “But you need to do something about it. You can’t suffer alone, Eric. It’s not going to just get better like that.

“I had that hopeless feeling too, just around a month ago. I burned myself out by going to Korea while still having that feeling. And I’m not trying to claim that I know exactly how you feel. Just… please.” Matt crouches next to the bench and dabs at Eric’s face with some sort of tissue, his every action exceedingly, painfully gentle. “Talk to me. Talk to someone. You don’t have to face whatever hurts you alone.”

Eric doesn’t have anything to say to that—because what do you even say to something like that?—but also because he’s on the verge of passing out again. He hears Matt sigh heavily, feels his friend's hand withdraw, and then his eyelids droop and he’s out like a light.

* * *

He wakes up in his bed the next morning to the worst hangover he’s ever experienced, barely any memory of what had happened last night, and a water bottle on his bedside table, note from Marissa taped to the cap and all. _“Call me ASAP,”_ it says.

It takes a couple of minutes for Eric to get himself together, and when he finally starts to piece together exactly what had happened the night before, he drops his head into his hands. That was a reckless decision, one he should never have made. Not only was that illegal, but it was the worst way for him to show an image of complete carelessness and dangerous neglect to management, who probably had to pick him up from that park.

What a way to end his LCS career just as he got it started. Heart heavy, he dials Marissa’s number.

“I hate you, Eric fucking Ritchie,” is the first thing he hears when she picks up. When he starts to apologize, she cuts him off. “No, you fucking idiot. I hate you. So much.”

He falls silent, not knowing what to say. After a brief silence she says, “Management doesn’t know about this. Keep it that way. And don’t you ever do that again.”

His mouth falls open. “How did you—”

“Deftly called Zeyzal, who called me to pick you up. No one besides the players knew this was going on.” Marissa’s voice softens. “Eric, if you were feeling so messed up and depressed that you were willing to get shitfaced in a park, why didn’t you say something?”

Eric doesn’t have an answer for that one either.

“But just… I don’t know,” she continues. “If something like this happened because no one—because I didn’t realize what you were going through, I’m glad last night wasn’t worse. And I’m sorry, because—”

“No,” he says loudly, surprising himself, and she falters on the other end of the line. “No,” he says again, softer this time. “That was on me. I’m sorry. It should never have gotten to this point.” He pauses. Matt’s words from last night echo through his mind once more. _“It’s not going to just get better like that… You don’t have to face whatever hurts you alone.”_

For the first time in a long time, Eric thinks he knows what to do with himself.

“I’m going to be okay,” he says. And he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> this was all inspired by a moment from one of Licorice's streams. it was the one he did with a face-cam and mic from Canada (there is no VOD saved, just as I mentioned in this fic, or else I'd clip and link it). he said exactly what is in the fic. "I’ve been feeling down lately... just the offseason, I guess." he looked really sad for all of a minute and that got me thinking, so, well... here you go, I guess. canon-compliant licorice-centric angst fic. and I live for licorice & deftly interactions so that got in here too, oops :o 
> 
> I honestly haven't seen our main 5 interacting all that much so that's kinda why I don't have jensen or sneaky in here as sources of comfort. no harm meant, just trying to be realistic. licorice seems to interact way more with the academy team (although I guess the recent benching flips the definition of academy on its head? lol)
> 
> anyways, he definitely seems very fine, especially from the c9 bbq/pool party stream on marissa's channel, so I'm not actually worried :)  
> thank you for reading <3 any feedback is appreciated!


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